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a clatter in the low trees and the slash of a stick being swiped into leaves announced that Vasyl was heading back. He liked to proceed by breaking whatever he could.
    â€˜Good evening, good evening. You are awake. This is splendid. We have just the time to walk and be there.’
    â€˜You’ve seen it?’
    â€˜Yes, yes. I don’t bring you all this way for no reward.’ He bent to his pack, couldn’t help hefting it slightly, checking it, to see if Alfred had taken anything, disturbed it. ‘Your belongings, you carry them. We may not pass this way again.’
    Alfred checking his own pack on principle, slow. ‘We never pass this way again. That’s the law.’ Happy he’d puzzled Vasyl with that, ‘All right, then. Lead on, Macduff.’
    â€˜This is from William Shakespeare, correct?’
    â€˜This is from William Shakespeare, correct.’
    But I still have the advantage, because I found Shakespeare myself. Nobody just gave him to me in a school: I earned him.
    There was sort of rabbit track and Vasyl set off along this, through young trees and over uneven ground.
    Alfred followed. ‘How do you know this is the way?’
    â€˜A British captain told me. They said the way and the place. He was there. He was with Montgomery also – saw him take the signatures for that first little surrender. He tells me one of the German officers has a briefcase with him: a very full briefcase, as if he would need it. As if they would let him keep it. That was a blooming good day, yes?’ Vasyl monitoring Alfred’s face as he said this, getting too loud.
    Alfred ignored him and they started off, pushed to a broad rise of tawny grass, junipers rearing up from it in dark plumes, banks of heather showing the first bluish haze of flower. Vasyl’s stamping about drove up a rush of small birds and Alfred hoped they were larks because he liked the thought of larks.
    Once they’d walked to their little horizon another had stretched beyond a break of trees and laid itself down in a shimmer of sun. There were sheep standing in the distance, or else pale rocks, and a cluster of buildings that could have been barracks at sometime: perhaps still were, but for an unintended army. There was a thin road, a shine that could have been from the windscreen of a truck.
    Alfred inhaled, the breeze sweet, tranquil, healthy.
    â€˜OK.’ Vasyl planted himself and folded his arms, staring firmly at a patch of grass. It seemed entirely like any other.
    â€˜What’s OK?’
    Vasyl frowned. ‘We are there.’
    â€˜I don’t see anything.’
    â€˜What would there be to see? This is their whole aim, they don’t make a memorial. He kills himself – in Uelzener Strasse, over in Lüneburg, you can go and discover – and they bury him where nobody will know except who did it. No bastards coming to put flowers.’ Vasyl turned his back slightly unsteadily, fumbled and began, Alfred realised, to piss. ‘You tell anyone I come here and I put what I like, which is best.’
    And what
should
you do if you’re standing where they buried Himmler? Dance, maybe, if that didn’t seem too frivolous, or wish him in hell if that didn’t seem too late, or – why not? – piss on him. There wasn’t a drill set down for the occasion. Plus, Alfred hadn’t planned this far, not having believed they would find the place and not exactly sure they really had. The ground here looked just the same as all the rest, the air still tasting very fine.
    Vasyl was dogged: emptying himself, you would have thought – an impressive volume. ‘You say to anyone who asks.’
    Say what, mate? That you can hold about a bloody quart? That you’re like Mr Woo in the air-raid warden song – could put out a fire?
    Alfred rubs the skin above his eyes, concentrates. ‘How can you tell this is it?’
    Because Alfred sounded annoyed and Vasyl